International Herald Tribune – Arms believed to have been manufactured in Iran as recently as last year have turned up in Sunni-majority areas as well as in the hands of Shiite extremists, a U.S. general said during a news conference Wednesday.
The officer, Major General William Caldwell, said the United States also had information from detainees that Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for Iranian intelligence were training Shiite extremists in Iran.
"We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support," said Caldwell, who sat near a table crowded with weapons that he said the military believed had been largely manufactured in Iran.
Some of the weapons had been found lying openly in the back seat of a car in a Sunni-majority neighborhood in Baghdad; others were in the car’s trunk.
The display of the weapons caches came as the military released figures showing that while violence in Baghdad had dropped by 26 percent between January and March, nationwide civilian casualties had risen. Just from February to March, casualties of civilians and Iraqi and American security forces rose 10 percent.
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"What does that mean?" Caldwell said. "It means we still have a lot of work to do."
The military announced that one soldier died on the eastern side of Baghdad from a roadside bomb early Wednesday and that another soldier died in southern Baghdad on Tuesday.
The military used the display of weapons alleged to have been made in Iran as an opportunity to deplore Iran’s failure to stop the apparent flow of weapons into Iraq.
"The death and violence in Iraq are bad enough without this outside interference," Caldwell said. "Iran and all of Iraq’s neighbors really need to respect Iraq’s sovereignty."
The link between Iranian intelligence and Sunni Arab insurgents is new.
The military has talked in the past, however, about the possibility that elements in Iran have supplied Iranian-manufactured bombs and the know-how for using them to Shiite militants.
It was unclear from the military’s comments Wednesday whether it was possible to draw conclusions about the appearance of weapons believed to be of Iranian origin in a predominantly Sunni area. There are several explanations for how they could have turned up in Sunni hands, military officials said privately.
Iraq is awash in weapons, and one possibility is that they came through Syria, which has long been a transit point for Iranian-made weapons being funneled to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia. Another possibility is that arms dealers with links to Iran weapons purveyors are selling to every side.
Caldwell declined to offer any information on the proportion of weapons found in Iraq that are believed to originate in Iran. He also did not say whether the trend had been up or down. In comments on the powerful roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, he referred to their prevalence in the period from October to December 2006 but did not say whether the military had continued to find them in similarly large quantities in the past three months.
The weapons that Caldwell put on display were found two days ago after a resident of the Arab Jihad neighborhood, a predominantly Sunni area, informed the local Joint Security Station run by Iraqi and American soldiers that there were illegal arms in the area.
When the soldiers went to the house the resident pointed out, they found a black Mercedes sedan. On its back seat, in plain view, was a rocket of the type commonly sold by Iran; in the trunk were mortar rounds marked "made in 2006." Inside the house and buried in the yard were more mortar rounds, 1,000 to 2,000 rounds of bullets, five hand grenades, and a couple of Bulgarian-manufactured RPGs, said Major Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician.
The weapons displayed and alleged to be of Iranian origin were labeled in English, which Weber said was typical of arms manufactured for sale on the international market. He added that the military knew they were of Iranian origin by "the structure of the rounds, the geometry of the tail fins and again the stenciling on the warheads," he said.
Weber also noted that the 81-millimeter mortar rounds are made regionally only by Iran. Other nearby countries make 82-millimeter rounds.
